Verho-ho-ho!: Paul Verhoeven Stuffs Our Stockings With A Perverse Christmas Thriller
Elle / directed by Paul Verhoeven
The opening scene of Elle administers an electric shock to the audience that will color our sense of everything that follows: a woman lies on the floor of her house, amid broken porcelain, as a masked intruder rapes her and her cat calmly looks on. She moans in pain, and blood runs between her legs. But as we move from this brutal, primal encounter between man and woman, the film begins to unsettle our sense of what has transpired, in the first place by playing with audience expectations of female victimhood. Michele Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) seems to calm quickly, even as the sight of her in her bathtub, blood rising to the surface of the water, offsets her peacefulness. Why isn’t she calling the police? Does this mean she wasn’t really raped? But we have the evidence of our senses to know that she was, even if Michele isn’t acting in ways that we expect. In a curious reversal, her lack of traumatization unnerves the viewer.
Our submersion into this layer cake of a film continues as we see Huppert at work as head of a video game company whose big project is a violent, World of Warcraft-esque enterprise. The current phase under development is graphics for a scene in which a woman in penetrated by a multi-tentacled creature in every place but her nether regions; but any lingering doubt around the nature of this digital encounter is cleared away as Michele chides her game designers to make the woman’s reactions to the creature’s depredations more orgasmic.
At dinner the next day with her ex-husband, her business partner, Anna, and Anna’s husband, Michele informs them in a matter-of-fact manner that she’s been sexually assaulted. When they ask her about the police, she says she doesn’t want to involve them because of her past history with them - a history that relates to suspicions about the degree of her involvement with her father committing a mass murder when she was just a child (another stratum of the extreme violence that underlies Michele’s story). But Michele does take measures to protect herself, including changing the locks on her doors. Nonetheless, in a dreamlike and implacable way, her rapist appears in her house again, and again brutally violates Michele. It might seem incomprehensible that she doesn’t contact the police at this point, and yet, in the movie’s dreamy logic, it makes perfect sense that she doesn’t, including for the reason that once again Michele seems to pull herself together quickly. She shops for more advanced defenses - pepper spray and a nasty looking hatchet.
In case you had any doubts left that this is no run-of-the-mill thriller, weaving around and often overtaking the mystery of her rapist’s identity and motivations are various melodramatic threads, including Michele’s relationship with her mother (who has taken up with a man forty years her junior), her affair with Anna’s husband, and her relationship with her son, who’s moving in with his pregnant girlfriend. But this is melodrama steeped in sin, from Michele’s affair, to her disrespect for her mother, to her coveting of her neighbor’s husband, to her jealousy over Anna’s relationship with her son, to her jealousy of her ex-husband’s new, younger lover. And yet this surfeit of melodrama plays out in such a matter-of-fact, dare I say “realistic” way, that it is something of a miracle to behold. All of Michele’s life exists in multiple meanings and ultimate ambiguities, without the film feeling showy, or academic, or like it’s simply playing games. It’s sober but not somber, edging up against the darkly comic without ever quite crossing into that territory.
Michele’s oscillation between powerlessness and power is Elle’s most fundamental rhythm, established in opening scenes that follow her rape with scenes of her authority at work, including delivering a stern rebuke to an employee who challenges her decision-making. But this is hardly all there is to her; amidst the complexities and improbabilities of the plots and themes bubbling everywhere in this film, Huppert embodies a complicated, conflicted personality who cycles between jealousy, pettiness, and lust as naturally as breathing; she is mesmerizing and magnetic.
Films like Starship Troopers have shown that Verhoeven is a master of creating and maintaining sophisticated tones, and Elle is something of a perfect distillation of this skill. It’s a meta-thriller that moves beyond the cleverness of its efforts into something fresh, resonant, disturbing, and weird.